Amid the ongoing and deliberate Israeli erasure of Palestinian cultural heritage, an urgent question emerges: Why does this erasure persist, targeting memory itself; archives, museums, manuscripts and historic landscapes alongside land and people?. The struggle over Palestinian heritage is not separate from the struggle over land. Humiliation under occupation goes beyond daily control, killings, and economic and psychological pressures. It is also embedded in the processes through which Palestinian land, history and memory are confiscated.
Bothaina Hamdan
Is Sebastia the Capital of Their Claims?
One of the latest remarkable recognitions, was on July 2026, UNESCO
inscribed the ancient Palestinian town of Sebastia onto the World Heritage list
and of World Heritage List in danger during its 48th session in
South Korea. This came in response to the application of the State of Palestine
and its efforts to preserve Palestinian sites and ancient towns and cities.
Sebastia is a town in the northern West Bank, near the city of Nablus. Back
to mid of 2025, it happened just like this: once, a shepherd was walking
through the nearby hills with his flock when Israeli military jeeps suddenly stopped
him and handed him an official order to annex 50 percent of the village and
transform it into an Israeli archaeological site. The messenger was a shepherd,
but the message was clear: half of your history is gone.
Israel claims its presence on our land through this ancient village,
where seven civilizations left their mark. It claims that Sebastia was once the capital of a so-called “Israelite
Kingdom,” but historians have never approved such a kingdom ruled from
Sebastia.
There are typically two versions of the story aimed at justifying Israeli
colonization: one version led by the Israeli government and another based on
excavation results. The two do not align.
One of the main sources opposing Israeli claims comes from the work of
influential twentieth-century British archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon. During her
1930s excavations at Sebastia, she demonstrated that the village cannot be
confined to a single historical narrative.
Significantly, the predominant extant architectural remains—the theater,
stadium, colonnaded street and Roman temple—belong to the Roman and Byzantine
eras.
The Israeli NGO Emek Shaveh objected in a recent report to the Israeli
government’s intent to annex the archaeological village, warning that it would
harm the “vibrant Palestinian heritage there.”
During my visits to Sebastia, I learned from tour guides and experts that
excavations have found no evidence supporting the claims of an Israelite
kingdom. If such evidence existed, they would likely publicize it.
I also saw wooden levers that had been used in an Israeli attempt to
steal Roman tombs weighing tons. The municipality of Sebastia preserves them as
evidence of the targeting of Palestinian heritage.
Origins of Israeli Intent to Wipe Out
Palestinian Heritage
Although Palestine was occupied in 1948 by Israeli Zionist forces, the
war against Palestinian cultural heritage began earlier, alongside the first
steps by Zionists to establish their state on Palestinian land.
Under the British Mandate, the Palestine Exploration Fund, founded in
1865, had links to Jewish interests in Palestine and related directly to the
British-Israeli arrangement to gift Palestine to the Jewish people.
The Zionist stated goal through this fund was to explore Jewish heritage
in Palestine, but most excavated sites proved to be Canaanite or related to
other civilizations. Even though Palestine is known as the Holy Land for three
religions that historically lived together, this does not justify replacing the
Palestinian nation with a Jewish state.
Today, the West Bank is subjected to a massive annexation project that
includes history itself, reshaping archaeological sites in ways that erase
Palestinian presence and convert them into Israeli-Jewish sites. Sebastia is only
one example.
In August 2025, the Israeli occupation authorities declared the annexation of 63 archaeological sites, most of them located in Nablus governorate, including Sebastia.
The Palestinian Ministry of Antiquities reported that, out of 17
archaeological sites in Hebron in the southern West Bank, 14 were ruined or
completely removed by Israeli forces and settlers. Additionally, between July
and August 2025 alone, Israeli violations affected around 70 sites across the
West Bank.
This illustrates another battle being waged against Palestinian history,
identity and narrative.
Gaza… the Long-Lasting Dream
Not far from my home in Ramallah, about two hours away, lies Gaza. Yet
since the Oslo Accords, movement restrictions have made visiting Gaza a dream
for most Palestinians. I was fortunate enough to visit twice, in 2021 and 2022.
When I reached the border, it felt enormous. I felt as if I were entering
another country.
Upon leaving Gaza, I asked a Gazan laborer about the exit gate. He calmly
replied, “This is the gate to heaven,” reflecting the way the world outside besieged
Gaza could be imagined as another realm altogether.
Even before the current war, Gaza had been completely besieged and had
endured repeated wars while living under extremely poor and difficult
conditions. I witnessed unpainted houses without windows, with openings
sometimes covered only by pieces of cloth. I walked beneath surveillance
aircraft, their buzzing constantly overhead.
For many artists and intellectuals, one of their simplest dreams was to
travel to show their work, ideas and talents to the world.
More recently, friends have told me, “There is no more Gaza. Many streets
we loved no longer exist.”
Today, when friends tell me that streets, homes and places we loved have
disappeared, I remember that laborer at the crossing and his words pointing
that everything out of Gaza is considered “heaven.” Too much of the Gaza I knew
has since disappeared.
I am a witness to the beauty of Gaza and to a legacy stretching back five
thousand years. I walked through its Old City, where more than 280 historic
buildings and sites including ancient homes, mosques, traditional markets,
churches, schools, public baths and other treasures—tell the story of a rich
and enduring culture.
There, I stopped at an old restaurant called Bait Sitti, meaning
“My Grandmother’s Home.”
The house itself is around 430 years old, a magnificent example of Ottoman-era architecture. Its owners lovingly restored it. Inside, visitors could experience elements of the traditional Palestinian home: handmade rugs, cozy sofas, clay jars and even a functioning water well.
The space was not simply a restaurant. It was a living expression of
cultural memory. One could even see there the celebrations of Christmas and New
Year in 2022, a glimpse of ordinary Palestinian life before so much of Gaza was
transformed.
Culturcide
The destruction of cultural heritage alongside mass human loss has
increasingly revived another term: culturcide: the destruction of the
material and symbolic foundations through which a people remembers itself.
The assault on Gaza has produced an unprecedented destruction of
Palestinian cultural heritage, extending the devastation from human life and
the built environment to archives, museums, libraries, historic buildings,
artworks and collective memory.
In 1948, Israel demolished around 500 Palestinian villages and has
continued demolishing homes and seizing Palestinian land to this day. This
systematic displacement is inseparable from the erasure of Palestinian identity
and memory.
During the first two months of the genocide, cultural heritage sites were
already among the places targeted. Each site, monument and piece of history
lost erases another fragment of Palestinian collective memory, affecting a
cultural landscape that belongs not only to Gaza and Palestine but to humanity
as a whole.
Palestinian official reports verified the destruction of 12 museums,
2,100 garments and embroidered items, 27 murals, eight publishing houses and
nine libraries. (Palestinian Ministry of Culture, November 2024).
Gaza hosts at least 316 culturally significant sites, of which 138
have sustained severe damage. Direct strikes accounted for 72 percent of
heritage damage, while only 29 percent remain confirmed as undamaged.
Yet Palestine’s National Heritage Record documents around 13,000
historical sites, with records stored on local and external servers. This
archive preserves narratives, photographs and old maps documenting the history
of historical Palestine, including the period before 1948.
Buildings can be demolished, archives burned and archaeological
landscapes fenced off, but erasure is never complete.
Palestinian heritage also survives in photographs, maps, family stories,
digital archives and the memories carried from one generation to another.
Perhaps this is why the battle over heritage has become so intense: whoever
seeks to control the land also seeks to control the story the land is allowed
to tell.
The Palestinian experience reveals a wider danger: archaeology can cease
to be a means of understanding a plural past when it is used instead to
establish exclusive ownership in the present. Cultural heritage belongs to
humanity precisely because it contains layers, encounters and memories that
cannot be reduced to one people, one period or one political claim.
Palestinian history cannot simply be erased or rewritten. It lives on, from
one generation to the next.
Bothaina Hamdan is a Palestinian writer and cultural policy expert based
in Ramallah-State of Palestine. She is originally a refugee from Annaba
village, which was destroyed by Israeli forces during the Nakba in 1948.